Playbox to explore its potential

The nursery of Australian playwrights is set for a shake-up, writes Raymond Gill.

Playbox theatre company is set to "refresh its brand", says chairman Paul Gardner.

And that might mean abandoning its strict charter that it produce only Australian plays, and instead produce work with an "Australian interpretation".

It might mean the company is no longer simply "playwright-based" but also "director-based".

It may produce work outside the confines of its well appointed Southbank complex at the CUB Malthouse, and it might engage more with other theatre companies across the country.

Everything, it seems, is up for grabs at Playbox following a nine-month internal review that coincides with last week's announcement that its artistic director of 11 years, Aubrey Mellor, is leaving at the end of 2004.

He has been appointed to the prestigious position of director of the National Institute for Dramatic Art in Sydney.

Gardner, a marketing and advertising executive and chairman of the Melbourne Football Club, said Mellor - who is well respected at Playbox - had been involved in the review, as he has also been in paving a way for his successor.

The review examined Playbox's very foundation back in 1976 when it bravely launched itself as the only theatre company in the country solely dedicated to producing new Australian plays.

"We have asked ourselves what does 'contemporary', 'Australian', and 'theatre' mean? We don't want to survive, but thrive," says Gardner, referring to last year's lean year at Playbox, when its audience reportedly fell by about 6000, to 40,000.

But the problems at Playbox go back further than last year's season. In the past few years Melbourne's theatre scene has undergone big changes.

Melbourne Theatre Company audiences have boomed due to artistic director Simon Phillips's recipe of slick production values, stellar casts and the varied choice of plays that included works by accomplished local writers who were nurtured at Playbox.

Meanwhile, small, actor-based companies such as Red Stitch, Hoist and The Store Room have sprouted (doing mainly foreign plays), while director-led companies including Raimondo Cortese's Ranters and David Pledger's Not Yet It's Difficult have tapped a more youthful audience in their rejection of the traditional "well-made play".

Despite Playbox's many achievements - its Asian and Aboriginal involvement and the fact that just about every successful playwright in the country younger than David Williamson owes their start to Playbox - the policy of "Australian only" means the strike rate of presenting a polished "well-made" play is low.

Gardner says the review addressed all these issues and once a new artistic director is chosen, the company will reinvent itself.

"We need to be engaging, provocative, fresh," he says.

The company will advertise for a new artistic director this week.

But any candidates looking to shake Playbox up with a generational change will be interviewed by a panel of veterans whose members are Mellor, Jill Smith, the company's general manager of 24 years, actor John Wood and outside observer Sue Nattrass.